The increase in availability of inexpensive Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) technology and telecommunications services has contributed to the drastic fall in telecommunication costs over the past several decades. It is now feasible from a cost perspective for an enterprise to locate their customer service agents in a call center in a foreign country to handle calls from customers in the United States. Decades ago, the cost of routing a call over a long distance would have made this practice impractical. A downside of this reduction of costs, is that it is now feasible for scammers to originate calls from overseas into the U.S. for various nefarious purposes.
Furthermore, VoIP technology, including a common protocol for controlling calls called Session Initiation Protocol (“SIP”), allows the call originator to indicate the calling party number (“CPN”). The CPN is also sometimes referred to as the automatic number identification (“ANI”), but there are slight distinctions in their function, but both the CPN and the ANI are commonly broadly used for referring to the telephone number of the originating party, and hence it is common for one skilled in the art to use these interchangeably. For purposes herein, the term CPN is used.
A call originator using SIP can indicate any CPN value in the call signaling, including one that is not allocated to that call originator. In other words, the CPN indicated by a party originating a call, when subsequently dialed, will not result in that call being routed back to that party. That practice is sometimes called “spoofing.” Thus, after the called party is presented with that CPN and later dials that number, the call would not be routed back to that call originator. It may be routed to someone else, or the number may not be even assigned. There are legitimate applications for spoofing. For example, doctors may employ a third party to originate calls to the doctor's patients for providing appointment reminders, where the third party is authorized to indicate the CPN of the doctor. Thus, patients viewing the CPN know that the call is from their doctor. However scammers take advantage of this capability to originate calls by pretending to be someone else.
For example, one common scam is for the call originator to allege they are from the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”). They may originate a call in a foreign country using a CPN associated with the IRS. When that call is delivered to the called party, the CPN may be used to query a database for calling name information. Thus, to a user with calling name delivery service, both the telephone number displayed and the calling name displayed indicate the call is from the IRS. The caller then informs the called party of money allegedly owed and demands payment from the unsuspecting individual. There are any number of variations where the scammers impersonate other officials. Typically, payment is in some form of gift cards or other forms that cannot be easily traced.
Many illegal calls are telemarketing calls that may originate in the U.S. in an attempt to sell a service. These telemarketing calls are frequently illegal because they target individuals indiscriminately. They call wireless and wirelines numbers, and typically ignore whether the called number is listed in the national or a state's do-not-call (“DNC”) database. Frequently, these illegal telemarketers originate a large number of calls, typically on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of calls per month. They recognize that in many instances, calls will be ignored or not answered, but the few instances where callers answer and provide monetary payment provide the incentive to continue operation of these scams. These telemarketers may or may not spoof a CPN in conjunction with these scams.
These and other types of calls are sometimes called “robocalls” in a derisive manner. For purposes herein, a “robocall” refers to a call that automatically plays a pre-recorded announcement or other audio recording to the called party upon the called party answering the call. For purposes herein, the caller (a.k.a. calling party) is said to be a “robocaller.” The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has variously defined a “robocall,” including one definitions based on calls dialed by an autodialer, but the scope of an “autodialer” is unclear. The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has used a definition of a robocall similar to what is indicated above in that it requires a recorded announcement to be automatically played upon the call being answered.
One obvious result of the definition used herein is that a call cannot be known to automatically play a pre-recorded announcement until the call is actually answered. Thus, a robocall cannot be identified with certainty until it has been answered. Yet, throughout this specification, reference will be made to handling a call on the assumption that it is a robocall. Information about a call may suggest a high likelihood that it is a robocall, and reference to such calls as being a robocall should be interpreted as the call as highly likely being a robocall. In other instances, where there is not a high level of confidence of the call being a robocall, the call may be referred to as potentially being a robocall or that it may be a robocall. The context should clarify as to the relative certainty of whether a call is a robocall or may be a robocall.
Robocalls have long been the number one consumer complaint made to the FTC and FCC, but many robocalls are legal and are desired by consumers. Many informational calls could be classified as a robocall, including emergency notifications, appointment scheduling or reminders, prescription refill reminders, bank fraud alerts, etc. Thus, there are many type of calls that are legal, beneficial, and desirable, which provide pre-recorded announcements to the called party. However, because scammers can easily and cheaply initiate such large numbers of illegal robocalls, this term has become synonymous with only illegal calls and has overshadowed those calls which are legal and/or wanted.
Technology can reduce illegal robocalls, but this is a challenge because it is not readily possible to determine which robocalls are legal, and which are not. Frequently, the determination involves knowing various factors that cannot be readily known from the call itself, including the contents of the announcement played after the call is answered, whether the called party is on a DNC list, whether the called party has an existing relationship with the calling party, etc.
The ability to “spoof” caller ID information (which may include either or both calling party number and calling name) allows an illegal robocaller to indicate caller ID information of a legitimate caller and thus make the robocaller appear to be legitimate. Spoofing caller ID information, such as the CPN, is not illegal unless misleading or inaccurate caller ID information is conveyed with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongly obtain anything of value. If no harm is intended or caused, then spoofing is frequently legal. Further, if the scammer is using a telephone number that is accurate, i.e., a number that is assigned to them, then they are not spoofing.
Some simplistic robocall mitigation approaches attempt to block a call based on the CPN. Robocall blocking schemes which attempt to block all calls based on a certain caller ID may inadvertently block legitimate calls, or allow illegal robocallers to circumvent such schemes by spoofing a legitimate caller ID value. Many of the approaches technological solutions proposed for managing robocalls are insufficient in that they attempt to use a single decision making approach to address the problem. Some may rely on a “whitelist” of approved CPN values, while others may rely on a “blacklist” of disapproved numbers. Other approaches rely on detecting the absence of a human being as the caller when the called party answers the call. However, this would screen out all robocalls, including wanted, legal calls.
The nature of the problem is that any one mechanism is likely to be deficient in managing the problem and does not address how to manage various levels of control that need to be offered to the various parties having legitimate interests. Further, many of these solutions do not provide adequate control mechanisms to called parties, carriers, and originators of legitimate robocalls. Therefore, mechanisms are needed to more accurately determine and manage how robocalls are treated with respect to blocking or otherwise identifying which calls are likely to be illegal calls. It is with this and other concerns that the disclosed concepts and technologies are presented.